Gessekai
by TimeTravelFreak
Summary: An introspective Zero story in which he thinks about words starting with the letter 's'.


Gessekai

A/N: This is simply an introspective piece for Zero that came to my mind, so I hope it's not too boring.

Many thanks to GoddesofWrath for the title – it means 'Moon World' and I think it fits Zero really well.

And I know that I should be working on Shades of Blue, but when inspiration strikes there's not much you can do to defend yourself…

For everyone who is waiting for the next chapter of SoB – I'm writing on it and it already has a decent length.

Warnings: It's dark and a little incoherent and disconnected (at least I think so), but maybe it fits Zero's thought process? -.-

Anyway, enough rambling: Enjoy!

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It was strange, Zero sometimes thought, that the two things he was accustomed to the most, that he was familiar with the most and that had been his constant companions ever since he was small, both started with the letter 's'.

Self-loathing and suffering.

It wasn't something that he liked to dwell on often, but sometimes, late at night, when his damned vampiric nature kept him from sleeping and he didn't have the courage to move because of the hunger that gnawed at his insides, he couldn't stop thinking thoughts like this.

Dark thoughts – thoughts that, were he to tell anyone about them, would cause Yuki and the Chairman to lock him up in a dark cell (dark, again because of his damned monstrous nature) with no weapons or other sharp, pointy things around.

It sometimes made him smile – bitterly, but it was a smile – at how easy it was to let everyone believe that the loathing he felt towards himself and the pain he felt every minute, every _second_ of his damned life – his _un_life really, because he wasn't living anymore, not since he had been turned, and maybe not even before that – was because he had been bitten by Shizuka.

In the mornings after these nights, he often wondered how it was possible that the Chairman and the Vampires knew that little about the life of a hunter – about the life of someone born into the Kiryuu family. It was laughable really. So much so, that it could move someone to tears.

But maybe that was just what Zero was thinking and it wasn't really that strange.

After all how should Vampires know about the traditions and the life of one of the oldest and most powerful hunter-families around?

Kuran might know a few things, but Zero's parents had always been paranoid – seeing every human they met as a potential monster, they had done everything in their power to keep their children safe – even if that meant that they hadn't been allowed to make any friends, even if they had always been on the move, even if the twins and later only Zero had had to go through gruelling training under one of the best hunters that existed and even if they hadn't seen their children for weeks.

It would probably be surprising to those who knew him that he had hated himself for a very, very long time.

As he had grown up and Ichiru had turned out to be a sickly child, Zero had felt guilty for stealing his twin's strength.

Because the two of them shouldn't exist – hunters of the Kiryuu family couldn't give birth to twins, since the children would ultimately start to fight for the other's strength while in the womb of the mother and in the end kill each other by draining each other – just like Vampires.

That was where his self-loathing started.

He had read about the 'curse' of his family and had immediately connected his sibling's weakness with it – and it hurt.

It hurt, because Ichiru was his twin, his other half and there was nobody on earth that Zero loved more than him – knowing that he was the cause of his brother's anguish and pain was almost too much to bear.

It got worse, when his parents made it obvious that they loved them equally. They shouldn't do that, they should despise him for hurting his own brother and they should love Ichiru all the more because he deserved it so much more than his older sibling.

Oh yes, Zero had loathed himself from the moment he had realised that he had stolen his brother's strength – which he now had plenty of.

Few people, who knew about Vampires and hunters but weren't personally involved in the conflict, knew about the things which were necessary for every hunter who wanted to live past his first assignment.

These things were above average strength, speed, will-power and most of all talent.

Zero had always had these things and after he had been bitten, it had only gotten worse he could break someone's hand simply with shaking their hand too strongly, he was faster than even many animals, he could see at night as if it was daytime and his will-power, which had always been remarkable, had grown to the point where he could starve himself for weeks straight until he had to drink some blood again and even then he held himself back, never drinking until he was full, always taking the least possible amount so as not to hurt his 'victim'.

He had heard Aido complain about his 'freakishly unnatural discipline' more than once and it had startled him that the Night Class paid that much attention to him.

As a child he had been even more scared of his power than he was now, which would be surprising to those who knew of his hatred of Vampires, but when he was younger, the thing he had been scared most about was his strength and his talent.

His parents and later his Master had trained him in hand-to-hand combat, in gun fighting, in fighting with blades (when fighting with blades was the thing that Ichiru could do despite being weak, Zero had refused any further training in that area) and every other kind of fighting that could give him an advantage in a fight with a Vampire.

In the end all the training in the world couldn't have prevented him from being bitten by Shizuka, but at the time, his teachers had all thought that they were doing a good job in preparing him.

What they hadn't known was, that their training would make Zero grow afraid of himself – he sometimes felt like a tool, a weapon that they were sharpening so that it could later be used to hack away at monsters – the Night Class would probably be surprised just how good a hunter their 'classmate' was, since he knew that they thought that he was completely defenceless against them.

He despised that he was now the same species as they were and he hated even more the helplessness that came with it. Even though that feeling wasn't unfamiliar to him as, even as a child, he had felt the despairing feeling of not wanting to hurt others, but knowing that one day it would inevitably happen, no matter what he did.

But, as selfish as it was, that wasn't really the reason why he hated having been turned.

He hated it because Shizuka had violated him.

She had turned him into something alien, something he shouldn't be – into something that shouldn't even exist. Ever since she had bitten him, it had felt as if his bones and his organs had rearranged and somehow _changed_ and it was driving him absolutely crazy, because he sometimes felt as if he was disconnected from everything and trapped in the body of someone else, someone strange and distinctly _wrong_.

He knew that the Vampires were curious about what drove an 'ex-human' mad and sometimes he wondered if he should tell them about it, just to see their reaction.

He didn't though, since he knew he would only satisfy their curiosity and satisfying a monster was the last thing he wanted to do.

He wondered what the Night Class saw when they looked at him – underweight because he refused blood, bags underneath his eyes because he couldn't sleep at night and couldn't sleep by day, suffering because he fought against his new nature, hating himself since he was now a monster, pathetic since he could never accept anyone's kindness…

He wondered what they would say were he to tell them that he hadn't been a monster since he had been turned – he had been one since before he had been born.

Suffering and self-loathing – they knew him well and sometimes he thought that in the end they would be the only thing left for him.

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Well, I congratulate everyone who managed to muddle their way through this piece and I hope you enjoyed it!

If you find any mistakes, please tell me and I'll fix them!

Yours,

TTF


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